Paging Dr. Bloch

By SANFORD PINSKER

1940
By Jay Neugeboren
274 pages. Two Dollar Radio Press. $15.

Jay Neugeboren (pronounced NEW-ge-born) is, to use the old-fashioned term, a man of letters, somebody equally at home in a wide variety of literary genres: the short story, novel, and memoir. The latest work from Neugeboren is 1940, his first novel in more than 20 years, but for those readers who remember earlier, prize-winning novels such as The Stolen Jew (1981) or Before My Life Began (1985), the wider canvas of 1940, with its inter-connected network of subplots, will be a welcome addition to his books about his brother Robert’s ongoing battle with mental illness or his own experience with a quintuple bypass.

1940 is simultaneously a psychological thriller and a love story, an evocation of the Bronx just before America entered World War II, and an impressive blending of research and the imagination. Largely told in the plodding Germanic rhythms of Dr. Eduard Bloch, Adolph Hitler’s childhood physician, the result deftly mixes memories of Hitler with learned nods toward Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. At stake is a medical illustrator’s missing father, her mentally disturbed son, also missing, and nothing less than the fate of Western humanity as Nazi Germany casts its dark shadow over Europe, and perhaps across the ocean.

As always, the making of art—artfulness, if you will—is never far from whatever story Neugeboren is out to tell. Here, for example, is how Elisabeth Rofman explains what she tries to capture as a medical illustrator:

She sat, and imagined that her father was standing next to her and that she was explaining to him, as Professor Brödel had explained to her, that illustration like the one he was looking at—unlike a photograph, which was merely imitative—had to comprehend its subject from all perspectives: topographical, histological, pathological, medical, surgical. From this knowledge a mental picture would come into being, and from this picture would the plan of the drawing would take shape.

That was why... a clear and vivid mental picture—what was left in and, more important, what was left out, always had had to precede the drawing itself.

Multiple perspectives and an uncanny sense of what should go into his paragraphs, and what should be edited out, are as good a way as any to account for Neugeboren’s success as a fiction writer.

In 1940, a number of crises in Miss Rofman’s life bring Rofman and Dr. Bloch into close proximity, and later, into love. But before we arrive at bliss, Neugeboren allows us to dip into Bloch’s efforts to write about the Hitler he remembers. In truth, the real Dr. Bloch wrote an article for Collier’s Weekly (March 15 and 22, 1941) in which he remembered Hitler as the “saddest man I had ever seen.” Moreover, he felt certain that Hitler’s mother, who he treated for breast cancer, would “turn in her grave if she knew what became of him.” By contrast, Neugeboren’s Dr. Bloch goes to some length to disconnect the young man he knew in Austria from the force of evil he became. Well aware that many scholarly theories lay Hitler’s rabid anti-Semitism at his feet, Dr. Bloch, the only Jew for whom Hitler personally arranged safe passage to America, defends himself in long stretches of his journals. A typical entry reads like this:

They do so, first, by using Doctor Freud’s Oedipus theory, a theory that often, when properly (and figuratively) understood, has clinical validity as an aid in interpreting particular neuroses and psychoses, but which, when used in an irresponsibly speculative manner, becomes, in effect, what a lumberman’s axe would be in the hands of a skilled surgeon.

It would be unfair to say that, where his journals are concerned, Bloch wields a lumberman’s axe much more than he does a surgeon’s scalpel. This will undoubtedly cause problems for readers who get lost in thickets of embroidery and over-qualification. Granted, Dr. Bloch—the fictional creation rather than the genuine article—is the culprit but the blame will surely fall to Neugeboren himself.

Finally, 1940 does not provide the wealth of culture detail that makes Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) such an enjoyable read, but Neugeboren’s novel is a also page turner. and better yet, a chance to meet, up close and personal, a largely unknown figure: Hitler’s childhood physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch.